Until the late sixties, in much of the country, the pigmentation differences between my wife and I would have made us felons had we tried to get married. According to one Virginia judge in 1959, “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Malay, and red, and he placed them on separate continents.…The fact that He separated the races shows that He did not intend for the races to mix.” When the Supreme Court finally declared the “antimiscegenation” laws unconstitutional in 1967, almost one in three states still had them on the books.
Today, all but the most hardened bigots accept that banning unions based on skin color is unconstitutional and just plain wrong. And yet many of the same people, such as Gov. Tim Pawlenty, use the same tired, illogical argument—that it is morally wrong—to rail against legally sanctioned same-sex unions. The fact that Minnesota already bans same-sex unions is not enough for this governor. He wants to amend the state constitution to make sure that ban remains beyond the reach of Minnesota’s traditionally civil-rights-minded judiciary. Progressive, fair-minded people need to band together to stop him. All Minnesotans should be able to get the legal and social benefits of a legally sanctioned union.
Despite the all the jokes, the married life does have a lot of real advantages. Married people get better insurance rates, preferred income-tax treatment, and a host of other legal benefits. Those who doubt the legal perks of marriage should talk to someone who has ended, either through a breakup or death, a less formal (i.e., living together) arrangement. The surviving half of the nonlegally recognized couple does not have the right to inherit that person’s property, can be legally excluded from participating in the funeral arrangements—the list goes on.
Not surprisingly, many of those who oppose same-sex unions rely heavily on the Bible. Now, I am not anti-Bible—I just believe that using the Bible to justify state-sanctioned discrimination can place one on a very slippery slope. Yes, Leviticus 18:22 states that man “should not lie with mankind, as with womankind: It is abomination.” However, Leviticus also states that a man should not have any contact with a woman while she is “in her period of menstrual uncleanliness”; permits slavery (provided the slaves come from neighboring nations); allows a father to sell his daughter into slavery; and directs believers to kill a neighbor who works on the Sabbath.
Our Founding Fathers wisely relieved us of the burden of deciding whether to kill our neighbors for cutting the grass on Sunday by creating a Constitution that expressly forbids our government from making any law “respecting the establishment of religion.” And that same Constitution also makes it very clear that we are all entitled to equal protection under the law. Now, when one views these two concepts in the context of same-sex unions, then the efforts to ban them become exposed for what they really are—discrimination based on homophobia-fueled religious dogma. Our current Constitution does not tolerate using religious beliefs as a battering ram for bigotry—which is why Tim Pawlenty wants a constitutional amendment to do his dirty work for him.
To paraphrase a bumper sticker, Pawlenty and the religious right need to keep their religion out of our laws. Recent court decisions in Massachusetts, Vermont, and Hawaii have held that there is nothing unconstitutional about permitting two human beings of the same sex to join together in a civil union. Whether it is “immoral” is perhaps a religious and personal decision, but it’s not one that should trigger statutory legal prohibitions. Beyond that, one would think that this supposedly “pro-family” governor would want to encourage all people, not just the heterosexual ones, to become part of a committed, monogamous relationship.
Now, I could understand the virulent opposition if churches were being forced to perform gay marriage ceremonies within their own walls. They are not. If the Jerry Falwells of the world want to refuse to permit a gay couple to make a lifelong commitment to each other in their churches—let ’em. The beauty of the religious freedom mandated by the First Amendment is that it keeps government out of their pulpits. It also keeps the religious right from imposing their narrow views of who is worthy of constitutional protection on the rest of us.
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